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If you are in a decision-making position in an Oklahoma company, is there any reason you wouldn’t want to consider doing business with a startup? You might think that there’s too much risk with a startup. Personally, I like optimism and passion. I favor businesses that stretch, that run lean, and that focus on cashflow. And I like to be part of helping a new business grow. I bet when you think about it, you do too.

If you are in a decision-making position in an Oklahoma company, is there any reason you wouldn’t want to consider doing business with a startup? You might think that there’s too much risk with a startup. Personally, I like optimism and passion. I favor businesses that stretch, that run lean, and that focus on cashflow. And I like to be part of helping a new business grow. I bet when you think about it, you do too.

If you are in a decision-making position in an Oklahoma company, is there any reason you wouldn’t want to consider doing business with a startup? You might think that there’s too much risk with a startup. Personally, I like optimism and passion. I favor businesses that stretch, that run lean, and that focus on cashflow. And I like to be part of helping a new business grow. I bet when you think about it, you do too.

What if established Oklahoma companies opened the door in a very deliberate way to the entrepreneurs and startups in our state? What if they became that special customer or supplier for an Oklahoma startup? i2E has a well-vetted portfolio of young businesses, some with customers that could act as a reference and some at an earlier stage. These are entrepreneurial firms with big ideas, groundbreaking solutions, and founding teams that are solving old problems with new ideas.

Many successful companies have some sort of dedicated innovation funding. Some companies prefer not to innovate internally and use innovation funds for acquisition of innovation developed outside the company. It seems to me that there is another path to corporate innovation that we could leverage more in this state — strategic partnerships between existing Oklahoma companies with startups that are developing leading edge technologies and solutions that solve problems of the company or its customers. When a company finds a startup (or more than one) that’s tackling a problem it wants to solve, becoming an early investor or strategic partner in that startup opens some interesting doors.

This state is always going to have to reconcile times of boom and bust until we reduce our collective dependence on oil and gas. We need investment from the state, but we also need creative participation from everybody else. There are Oklahoma corporations, initiatives, and people who get that and are doing something. One such business is Kimray, Inc., a world-class manufacturer of control equipment used extensively in oil and gas production around the globe.

This state is always going to have to reconcile times of boom and bust until we reduce our collective dependence on oil and gas. We need investment from the state, but we also need creative participation from everybody else. There are Oklahoma corporations, initiatives, and people who get that and are doing something. One such business is Kimray, Inc., a world-class manufacturer of control equipment used extensively in oil and gas production around the globe.

BrewFest attracts more than 500 people. It’s a unique opportunity for the entrepreneurial community in Oklahoma to come together for a few hours to network and enjoy tasting products from yet another emerging and nontraditional segment of Oklahoma’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Events like BrewFest draw together people from across Oklahoma who are interested in the innovation economy here. In this casual environment, they learn things they didn’t know about making wine, brewing beer and about what’s happening in innovation across Oklahoma.

It feels almost like serendipity when a startup solves a problem that is so large and well understood that it takes just a couple of simple sentences to describe, even to a stranger, what that startup does. For Tulsa-based Synercon Technologies, that simple sentence is: “We make it easy to recover heavy vehicle crash data.” Synercon provides a hardware/software solution that allows traffic crash investigators to quickly acquire digital forensic “black-box” data from a heavy vehicle crash.

As the cost of living continues to rise on either coast, but particularly in places like California and New York City, it is becoming more and more attractive for entrepreneurs to start companies somewhere else. They need talent and capital to do that of course, but as those critical components are more in evidence, we’re seeing startup activity branching out geographically.

From their own firsthand experience, Alex Golimbievsky and Ntuna Ekuri identified a big problem that companies will pay to solve. They imagined a solution. They are located in Oklahoma, where Silicon Prairie versus Silicon Valley costs of living and operating businesses are favorable. They find affordable development talent online thanks to trends in the share-economy, a reminder that geography and proprietary technology are playing a smaller role for startups than ever before.

Entrepreneurs are the drivers of this phenomenon we have branded Innovation to Enterprise. They prove concepts. They convince investors to invest. They convert the doubtful. They persuade first customers to take a risk on their new ideas. They encourage founding teams to stay the course on the darkest days. And entrepreneurs inspire. They show the rest of us what is possible and what is NOT impossible. Their inspiration is what the 2016 Oklahoma Entrepreneurial Summit and Who Wants to Be is all about.